Heart and Soul - The Emotional Autobiography of Melissa Bell, Alexandra Burke's Mother. Melissa Bell
because we just don’t want to hear bad news, preferring to stick our heads in the sand and keep on enjoying the moment for as long as we can before we eventually have to face up to the fact that we are mortal and sooner or later the party is going to have to end and the music is going to be switched off.
We don’t like to be cut either, so we tend not to rush to donate our organs, believing we should go back to God at the end of our lives in the same state that he made us, with no cuts or incisions. I lost that battle when I was three weeks old and the surgeons sliced open my tiny little back to remove the suspicious-looking growth. If there was any chance of finding a new kidney, I would be more than happy to surrender to the scalpel again.
There are usually more men than women patients on the ward. In fact, at one stage, I was the only woman in here. Maybe that’s why hardly anyone speaks to one another once we are in through the doors. In my experience, most men don’t tend to like to communicate quite like we do, seeming to prefer to internalise everything. Having said that, I’ll admit that the man who lucked out and had the kidney transplant used to like a bit of conversation to pass the time, but most don’t. He was very educated and eloquent and I enjoyed talking to him, but once you’ve got a new kidney you never have to go on a dialysis machine again (unless that one packs up on you too), so I haven’t seen him since.
Even though every bed in the ward is occupied, it can feel quite isolated sometimes, just lying there with the nurses bustling about their business around the beds and behind the screens, listening to the sound of the machines, waiting for it all to be over so I can get back in the car and go home to my own unmade bed. For those few hours, it feels like you have no control over your own life, no freedom of choice in what you do. Some people find it comforting to have other people making all their decisions for them. They become institutionalised and seem to lose the will to do anything else. I am determined not to let that happen to me.
Getting up early on these mornings is almost always painful. When the alarm goes off at a quarter to six the last thing I want to do is drag myself out from under the covers and on to the streets of King’s Cross. Even at that hour of the morning the traffic is already heavy because of all the building and development work that has been going on around the area, and because people are already starting to arrive for work in the new office blocks that have been opening up in previously neglected streets.
Before leaving the house, I have a quick wash, pull on whatever clothes I need that day, whether it is just pyjamas or a dressing gown, or something more formal if I might be going on somewhere after I’ve finished the treatment. I don’t want to wear anything heavy because the first thing the staff do when they let us in is weigh us to find out how much fluid we have put on since we were last there and I don’t want to make things seem any worse than they are.
I never pee any more. My kidneys have failed totally and all the poisons and bad stuff which they should be taking out of my blood and turning into urine just stay there until the machine extracts them, running round and round in my veins, waiting for a chance to kill me, hoping I’ll get careless and allow them an opportunity to strike. It’s shocking how much you miss something as simple as having to go to the toilet every few hours, something that you once took for granted or at most saw as a bit of a nuisance.
The ward is empty and waiting for us when the doors of the clinic are finally opened, the machines all cleaned out and disinfected, standing ready beside each bed for us to be hooked up. The nurses move quietly and briskly around them, making sure all our notes are in the right places and that we will have everything we need as we arrive. We look for our folders to see which bed we have been allocated, like guests at some formal dinner looking for our place names, or children searching for their names on school notice boards.
‘Who’s first?’ someone carrying a clipboard asks.
‘That’s probably me,’ I usually say, slightly embarrassed by my own keenness, but still determined not to lose my place in the queue and end up wasting more of the day than I need to. The others probably think I’m a bit pushy, always trying to be the first to be hooked up.
The tubes go into previously opened holes in my chest, one to carry the contaminated blood out, the other to bring the filtered and cleaned blood back in. It would be better if they could go into my arm, but the nurses haven’t yet been able to find a vein there that’s big enough to do the job. They keep searching and working at it. Once I’m connected up, the machine starts humming and a nurse brings me a little polystyrene cup of tea and a piece of toast to give me a bit of strength. I just sip at the tea because I don’t want to use up my daily fluid allowance too quickly in case I want to drink something else a bit more delicious later in the day. Each day I’m only allowed three-quarters of a litre of fluid. That’s the big problem about not peeing any more: you can’t risk taking the fluid in if you have no way of letting it out. Imagine how frustrating it is not to be allowed to have a long drink of cold water when it’s a hot day and you’re really thirsty. At moments like that all I can do is suck on an ice cube.
I settle back to concentrate on my thoughts and my memories. My life has turned out to be very different from anything I ever expected.
Things were going pretty well for Dad in those early days in London. He had been able to buy a house, and he had a steady job at the dry cleaner’s, which he enjoyed, and lots of friends. He even bought himself a new car, a top-of-the-range Vauxhall limousine, or at least that was what it seemed like to me at the time. Not all the neighbours liked his flash ways, but I noticed they still liked to come to his Saturday-night parties. He eventually lost the car because he got drunk one evening and forgot to take the keys out of the ignition when he got home. (Believe it or not, it only became illegal to drink and drive in England in 1967, and I expect it was a while after that before men like Dad thought the law actually applied to them.) By morning, the car was gone, never to be seen again.
Next he got a really smart Hillman Hunter (a bit like a Ford Cortina), which was new on the market around that time. It had white bodywork and a black roof and it was his pride and joy.
Although Dad was earning quite well, Mum also contributed to the family budget by getting paid to look after friends’ children. Most of them were women who had come from the West Indies like us and needed to work all week in order to support themselves and their families. The kids used to be delivered to our house on Monday mornings with mountains of nappies and food to see them through the week and Mum used to put them in any spare corner she could find. All our beds were always full of other people’s children but nobody minded. It was like it was the normal way for people to live and Mum was just providing a service that the other women needed. I dare say nowadays some nosy neighbour would complain to social services and there would be people from the council coming round to inspect her. She would probably be closed down in no time, but then it all seemed perfectly normal and acceptable.
Mum also made extra money by doing her friends’ hair for them at the weekends, styling their wigs on plastic heads so they could pull them on for parties on a Saturday night. These were the days when the musical Hair was playing on the London stage. It had starred the beautiful Marsha Hunt, who then went out with Mick Jagger and eventually had his baby. Her giant Afro hairstyle was famous and everyone was trying to emulate it, even the men. Jimi Hendrix had led the way in the late 1960s, of course, but then there had been movies like Shaft to carry it on and make ‘big hair’ acceptable for the man and woman in the street, not just the rock stars. The Afro became as much a part of 1970s fashion as flares and platform boots.
I liked the fact that the house was always full of people and voices and activity, and I also liked the biscuits that the children arrived with, surreptitiously slipping them into my own mouth whenever no one was looking.
Mum said I could have a cat of my own, and I ended up getting several over the years. They were all male for some reason, maybe because they were the ones people wanted to get rid